#Your first session

Open the Shell, type what you want done, and watch the work stream back to you line by line — your first session, start to finish.

#Overview

The Shell lives inside Arachne and gives you a real command line with Nourva's safety and control wrapped around it. This page walks you through your very first session: opening the Shell, deciding where your work runs and how much freedom Nourva has, typing your first request, and watching the output arrive live.

Nothing here is throwaway. A session keeps its history and its running state, so once you start you can follow a task from beginning to end, step away, and come back to exactly where you were. The goal of this first walkthrough is simple: get you comfortable starting a session, reading what happens, and stopping whenever you want.

#What you can do in a first session

  • Open the Shell from inside Arachne and start a fresh session.
  • Choose where the session runs: locally on your own machine, or in a secure, isolated environment kept separate from your system.
  • Choose a permission level for the session, from cautious to fully automatic.
  • Type a plain-language request and let Nourva carry it out, or type an ordinary command you already know.
  • Watch the output stream back live, line by line, as it runs.
  • Stop a running command immediately, or end the session cleanly when you are done.

#How to use it

  1. Open the Shell. Go to Arachne and open the Shell. A new session starts ready for your input.
  2. Decide where it runs. Choose between your own machine and a secure, isolated environment. Pick the isolated option when you want the work sandboxed and separate from your system; pick local when you want to work directly with your own machine and files. When you are exploring for the first time, the isolated environment is the safer place to start.
  3. Choose a permission level. Set how much freedom the session has, using the same levels as the rest of Nourva:
    • Look only — the session reads and inspects but changes nothing.
    • Plan first — Nourva proposes a plan and waits for your approval before acting.
    • Ask before acting — Nourva pauses for your permission before each change.
    • Work in your workspace — Nourva acts freely inside your project or folder, and nowhere outside it.
    • Act automatically — Nourva carries the whole task through on its own.

Start cautious. Look only or Plan first is a good way to learn what a session does before you give it more room.

  1. Type your request or command. You can describe an outcome in plain language and let Nourva work toward it, or type an ordinary command you already know and run it directly. Either way the permission level you set stays in force.
  2. Watch it work. Output streams into the Shell live as the command runs, so you see exactly what is happening in real time rather than only a result at the end.
  3. Stop or finish whenever you want. Stopping always works immediately. Use kill to stop a command that is currently running, and close to end the session cleanly when you are done. Whatever the session did is kept as a durable receipt you can return to.
Tip

For your first run, choose the isolated environment and a cautious permission level. You will see the full loop — type, stream, verify — without changing anything on your own machine until you are ready.

#Examples

A first plain-language request

text
List the files in this project and tell me which ones are the largest.

You see the work stream into the Shell live, and Nourva reports back the files with the largest ones called out — checked before it tells you it is done.

A first ordinary command

text
echo hello from my first session

The output appears line by line in the Shell as it runs, exactly as you would expect from a command line, with Nourva's safety and permission level still around it.

Stopping a command mid-run

text
kill

A command that is still running stops immediately, the live output halts, and the session stays open so you can decide what to do next. The durable receipt of what ran up to that point remains.

#Tips

  • Begin with the isolated environment and a low permission level; raise the level only once you trust what the session is doing.
  • Watch the first run all the way through — the live stream is how you learn to steer, and it is much easier to adjust early than after the fact.
  • If you are unsure what a session can do, type help to list the built-in session commands available to you.
  • You do not have to wait at the screen. A long job keeps running in the background, and you will be told when it finishes — so feel free to step away once it is underway.